Literary text

Father died in front of the forbidden tv channel

“Roj TV” has often been accused of being the mouthpiece of the Kurdish armed movement, PKK.

Forbidden Chirping

“Humor is the foremost weapon of the weak,” said Turkish author Aziz Nesin. In this short play, the artist and poet Yeşim Ağaoğlu uses humor to show what is unrolling in her native country. Ağaoğlu belongs to the new generation of leading artists and poets in Turkey who see an increased sidestepping of the freedom of speech and are calling out to do something about it.

Writing letters on water

Trials without end, shady evidence, and fabricated documents are a reality in today’s Turkish judicial system. Translator Petek Demir was tired of seeing his writer and journalist colleagues imprisoned, so he began to work part-time as a paralegal. In this article, he takes us behind Kafka-like proceedings, where one paradox succeeds another.

Kamber Ates, how are you?

Gülsum Cengiz is one of the most acclaimed poets in Turkey. She wrote this poem during the 90s when Kurdish was a forbidden language in the prisons. In order to talk to her imprisoned son, a Kurdish woman learns one sentence in Turkish. Though this poem was written almost twenty years ago, it is still relevant for what is going on in the country.

Film director and daughter of a guerrilla leader

Mizgin Müjde Arslan is viewed as one of Turkey’s most exciting young filmmakers. In the below, she describes her encounter with the limits of freedom of speech and what happened when she wanted to make a movie about her father, whom she hardly met but who was an active Kurdish guerrilla. The result was the much-acclaimed documentary, “I flew, you stayed” (2012)—and some time spent in jail.

Modern Persian lyric

Day by day, the censorship in Iran becomes stricter. The young Iranian poet Leili Galehdaran has therefore chosen to send her third collection, Sinior to the Swedish-located publisher Baran. If she had tried to get it printed in Iran, the book had, with necessity, been a totally different kind of poetry collection.

Numbers, people

Aslı Erdoğan never shies away from sensitive topics. She is one of the foremost young writers in Turkey, and she has never stopped writing about civil rights for the Kurdish people, about women’s rights, and in the defense of freedom of speech. She lives in Switzerland, where she had to seek asylum from a prison sentence in her home country.

The Bridge

It is way too early to talk about the “results” of the revolution in Egypt. Some commentators worry about that everything will remain the way it was, but the Egyptian writer Somaya Ramadan sees a slow change of the life in the streets—not least in a blurring of the class borders. The very symbol of this is the construction of a new bridge across the Nile.

Each cry from Syria is for you

The whole world can follow the atrocities in Syria. We have been able to do that for more than a year. The only thing that seems impossible is to find political means to put an end the killings. The situation is of course unbearable for those who gets glimpses of the situation through friends and relatives, who themselves may be in danger.

The princess and the slave—how love kills in Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, where four-fifths of the population is illiterate, poetry has always had a strong position—especially among women. The Afghan writer and journalist Nushin Arbabzadah writes here a letter to the poet and Princesse Rabia Balkhi, who lived in the 900's and faced a tragic fate. She fell in love with a slave and was imprisoned by her own brother because of it.

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